MBR recovery

Just thought this might be useful to someone else:

In the course of attempting to convert my single drive to RAID-1 (I had a
"spare" drive hanging around) I managed to clobber the partition info in
the MBR. This was using the nVidia BIOS RAID management (nForce3 mbrd) and
yes I felt dumb but it is confusing: "Select Drive?"... "Delete Array?"...
"Clear Data?"... "Delete Data?"... etc., etc.

So... facing the prospect of hours of reinstall and restore from backup --
yes I had one -- I gave BootitNG (www.bootitng.com) a try just to see what
it would make of the drive contents: sure enough, the Partition Management
utility showed an empty drive *but* the Undelete button was not greyed out
so I clicked on it and it scanned the drive and recovered the partition
layout in a few seconds.... *RELIEF*:-)

Oh, and yes, I did get the RAID-1 working but what a PITA it was -- note
nVidia's docs give no clues about building a mirror from a single existing
drive -- and rebuild in WinXP was excruciatingly slow: ~12GB/hour on SATA
drives.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

George Macdonald wrote:
So... facing the prospect of hours of reinstall and restore from backup --
yes I had one -- I gave BootitNG (www.bootitng.com) a try just to see what
it would make of the drive contents: sure enough, the Partition Management
utility showed an empty drive *but* the Undelete button was not greyed out
so I clicked on it and it scanned the drive and recovered the partition
layout in a few seconds.... *RELIEF*:-)

Yeah, I am a big fan of BootitNG too. I just upgraded one of my drives
from 80GB to 300GB just yesterday, and I used to BING to copy the data
over.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:
: George Macdonald wrote:
:: So... facing the prospect of hours of reinstall and restore from
:: backup -- yes I had one -- I gave BootitNG (www.bootitng.com) a
:: try just to see what it would make of the drive contents: sure
:: enough, the Partition Management utility showed an empty drive
:: *but* the Undelete button was not greyed out so I clicked on it
:: and it scanned the drive and recovered the partition layout in a
:: few seconds.... *RELIEF*:-)
:
: Yeah, I am a big fan of BootitNG too. I just upgraded one of my
: drives from 80GB to 300GB just yesterday, and I used to BING to
: copy the data over.
:

Been using this Terabyte program in all it's incarnations since 1998.
There is simply NO other boot manager and/or backup proggie that even
comes close to the quality of BING....period. I'm **still** laughing at
all the clueless masses that insist on sticking with crapware from the
likes of Symantec and so on.

j.

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 14:36:36 -0500, Yousuf Khan wrote:

George Macdonald wrote:
So... facing the prospect of hours of reinstall and restore from backup --
yes I had one -- I gave BootitNG (www.bootitng.com) a try just to see what
it would make of the drive contents: sure enough, the Partition Management
utility showed an empty drive *but* the Undelete button was not greyed out
so I clicked on it and it scanned the drive and recovered the partition
layout in a few seconds.... *RELIEF*:-)

Yeah, I am a big fan of BootitNG too. I just upgraded one of my drives
from 80GB to 300GB just yesterday, and I used to BING to copy the data
over.

I've been using it since PowerQuest decided they wanted ~$900. for a
partition manager which worked with Windows Server partitions... something
I'm likely to need once in a blue moon... and I've no need for a "dynamic"
file system. I wish they'd make their licensing easier though.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald